Full Stack JavaScript Strategies

Chapter 31. Working on Different Types of Projects over Your Career

Throughout this book, you’ve built a greenfield product, which means you built it from scratch and made all the initial decisions on how the code should be developed. While you’ll get a chance to work on projects like these, it’s a less common scenario. Often there is an existing codebase with established practices, and there are core functionalities that can’t be easily changed.

As you go to different organizations over the course of your career, you’ll pick up a lot of new skills and patterns from existing projects. You’ll join teams of other senior devs and learn new paradigms and methods for building apps. When you get a chance to do something similar to what you’ve done throughout this book, you’ll go in with even more experience. A greenfield project will stretch you in different ways after you’ve worked on legacy projects for a while.

In this chapter, I’ll go over:

• Considerations for brand-new apps

• Considerations for existing apps

• How all of this affects your career

This is where you can explore your experience and how it differs between greenfield and legacy projects. I’ll give you some key things to look for depending on what type of project you’re working on.

Considerations for Brand-New Apps

You have to make a lot of decisions early that will determine the future maintainability of a greenfield codebase. You’ll be able to refactor things and swap out components and packages for better ones ...